From cosmos to erasure, late Korean masters revisited at global galleries

Rhee Seundja's "In the Bed of Torrent" (1961) / Courtesy of the artist

As 2026 begins, a string of international blue-chip galleries are turning their Seoul spaces over to late Korean masters.

One exhibition stages a quiet, transnational conversation between artists shaped by exile; another turns its gaze to the final decade of a painter’s life. Together, these shows linger on masters whose legacies continue to unfold well beyond their lifetimes.

Exile and cosmos: Rhee Seundja, Etel Adnan at White Cube Seoul

At White Cube Seoul, a dialogue takes shape between two late women artists — Korea's Rhee Seundja (1918-2009) and Lebanese American Etel Adnan (1925-2021). Born 5,000 miles apart, both gravitated toward Paris, where they forged their respective languages of abstraction.

Titled “To meet the sun,” the exhibition gathers their paintings and tapestries, tracing an encounter between practices shaped by displacement.

Rhee’s move to France during the upheaval of the 1950-53 Korean War marked a decisive turning point. Separated from her three young sons, she arrived in Paris confronting both personal loss and the male-dominated terrain of postwar abstraction.

Her densely worked canvases of the late 1950s register memories of her homeland and a longing for her children. The following decade saw the emergence of her “Woman and Earth” series, where geometric elements began to stand in for body and landscape, intimacy and expanse.

Installation view of the exhibition, "To meet the sun," at White Cube Seoul / Courtesy of the artists, White Cube, ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2025

Adnan, too, was reshaped by conflict. After the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975, she eventually settled in Paris, where exile condensed into a distilled chromatic vocabulary.

Another point of correspondence lay in the two creators’ cosmological vision, informed by the space race and the lunar missions of the 1960s.

Celestial imagery recurs across their canvases: for Rhee, geometric configurations evoke the architecture of the Earth and, later, planetary systems, while for Adnan, blazing suns and crescent moons hover within fields of saturated color.

“We’re not trying to make a heavy, didactic argument for the two artists, but it’s a nice opportunity for us to introduce an international artist to our audience here [in Seoul] in conversation with an important Korean artist,” said Susan May, the gallery’s global artistic director.

Choi Byung-so's "Untitled 0230305" (2023) / Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin

Final decade of Choi Byung-so at Perrotin

A two-minute walk from White Cube leads to Perrotin, where the gallery presents its first solo presentation of Choi Byung-so (1943-2025) since his passing.

Choi built his practice around a deceptively simple, performative act: repeatedly covering printed newspapers with dense, overlapping lines drawn in ballpoint pen and pencil. As the marks accumulate, the paper begins to fray and rupture. At the height of his productivity, he used more than 100 pens a week.

The origins of this erasure process can be traced to childhood. When Choi was in elementary school in the 1950s, textbooks were printed on coarse newsprint. As he scribbled notes across their fragile pages, the paper would wear thin and ragged. The tactile memory of that material stayed with him.

Later encounters with Korea’s experimental art movements of the 1970s, along with Lucio Fontana’s radically slashed canvases, revealed new possibilities. The artist produced his very first work in 1975.

Installation view of Choi Byung-so's solo exhibition, "Untitled," at Perrotin Seoul / Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin

Although he never explicitly framed the act of crossing out text as political, the gesture has often been interpreted as a quiet resistance to the authoritarian regime’s censorship at the time.

The current exhibition concentrates on the final decade of his career, a period marked by larger-scale works in which the physical strain of repetition becomes even more palpable.

Among them is the rare “Untitled 0241029.” Here, an empty sheet of paper is worked over with a pen that has run dry. No ink remains — only the pressed indentations of the artist’s hand. In the absence of visible marks, the trace of his labor becomes more immediate.

Both exhibitions run through March 7.